Madam Speaker, if the hon. member had been paying attention, he would have realized that I was simply quoting from a newspaper article from this morning.
Many people here know in fact who the Prime Minister is as well as the leader of the opposition. We will not have to repeat that for the hon. member.
In any event, the Prime Minister said that it was time for the Conservative Party to stop playing politics and help pass amendments to the federal budget to ensure municipalities would get millions of badly needed funding. The coverage pointed out, however, that in fact the budget, which includes a phased in 5% share of gasoline tax for municipalities over five years, passed last Thursday.
Without naming the Prime Minister, I would point out that he was a little confused, as well as many people might be with having two budgets, an original budget and a new non-budget. For clarity, I wanted to point that out. I appreciate the hon. member's note that it is not just members such as himself, but even the Prime Minister who is a little confused about the budget to which we now are speaking. It is the amendments negotiated with the NDP for an additional $4.6 billion in spending which have yet to pass.
We are talking today about Bill C-48, the NDP budget, which is the non-budget, or the absence of a budget. It is in addition to the original budget which was passed last Thursday and which our party supported. This addition of $4.6 billion is simply an NDP promissory note to buy votes. It is more socialist spending to prop up a failing Liberal government clinging to power.
The so-called budget, Bill C-48, is heavy on the public purse but light on details. It commits hundreds of millions of dollars under broad areas without any concrete plans of how that money will be spent, as the member for Wild Rose mentioned moments ago. We have seen the damage that can be done by spending without a plan.
Bill C-48 would authorize the cabinet to design and implement programs under the vague policy framework of the bill and to make payments in any manner it would see fit. It is $4.6 billion in less than two pages. It is very vague and general and it has no plan.
The government has reserved the right to use the first $2 billion in the 2005-06 and 2006-07 from the federal surplus presumably for federal debt reduction. Any surplus that exceeds $2 billion could be used to fund programs related to the NDP sponsored bill.
The government would need to post $8.5 billion in surpluses over the next two fiscal years to fully implement the budget. The point is there is no money. It is all talk. The reason it is vague is these promises to the NDP for this additional budget, Bill C-48, to Bill C-43 will never see the light of day. The money simply is not there.
In order to have sufficient funds and the surpluses, the Minister of Finance would have to have another phoney budget, as he has had before, declaring a surplus every year. There is only one reason to declare a surplus and that is because the people have been taxed too much. It is just bad accounting and bad budgeting. It is not budgeting. It is an absence of budgeting. It is bad management. It is a lack of a plan.
The government has a lack of planning in everything it does. We are still waiting for Kyoto. I see the member for Red Deer is here. He is the Conservative environment critic. He has explained to the House time and again that we have been eight years without a plan on Kyoto. We are eight years without a fiscal plan from the government.
The government has a broad plan. It asks people what they want today do buy votes? Today we are spending $4.6 billion buying the votes of the NDP.
I mentioned the news comments this morning and the Prime Minister's confusion over legislation in the House; that is what bills have or have not been passed. I see the Department of Finance has done a poll on behalf of the government to determine what people think of the budget. Is that not a great expenditure of taxpayer money? “Let's go out and poll and see how we're doing so far”.
This is a government that spends tax dollars polling and running ads with taxpayer money. It is a constant election campaign funded by taxpayers, whether it is through ad scam, the sponsorship scandals, or running polls through various government departments, the Privy Council Office or the Prime Minister's Office and now the Department of Finance to find out what the people think. It wants to find out the current consensus of Canadians. The government then runs around to the front of the parade and says to the people to follow it. That is how to govern our country? I do not think so. Again, it is done without a plan, it is expensive and it is taxpayer money.
Canada could have and should have more better paying jobs and a much higher standard of living. However, Ottawa taxes and spends too much. Since 1999-2000, program spending has gone up from $109.6 billion to $158.1 billion, an increase of 44%. In the last five years, spending has gone up 44% in our country, a compound annual growth of 7.6%, when the economy itself managed to grow by only 31%, a compound annual growth of 5.6%.
Once the Liberals had our money, they could not resist spending it even faster than the economy was growing. It is not surprising there is so much waste in this government.
Often the government responds to problems in a knee-jerk way by throwing money at problems. The Liberals confuse spending money with getting results. Let me list some examples. They have thrown money at the firearms registry as way of dealing with the criminal misuse of firearms, with no explanation of how this would prevent criminals from getting and using guns. The registry was to cost $2 million. Media reports say that the actual cost is around $2 billion. How could they possibly spend $2 billion on a simple gun registry?